In May 1957, USAF test pilot Maj. Austin A. "Gus" Julian was tasked to fly a Voodoo from Edwards AFB to the McDonnell factory at Lambert Field in St. Louis, Missouri, taking fuel from both of the Air Force's test KC-135A tankers to test and develop procedures for the ultimate record attempt. On the morning of 27 May 1957, Gus Julian departed from Edwards AFB and headed east toward the first tanker rendezvous point. In 2012, he related to me the hair-raising story of his flight:
The
fuel system had a lot to be desired in the original F-101. As I said, you have five tanks, strung out
along the fuselage and all feeding out to number 1 to the engines. I remember an incident I had where TAC was
setting up an operation they called SUN-RUN, it was a [speed run from]
California to [New York]. I was told to
see what I could do with the airplane.
So, I set it up to go from Edwards to McDonnell, and was going to use
the [new KC-135] for in-flight refueling. Now up to that time, we had never used
[“flying-boom”] refueling, even during Phase VI because, mainly, we didn’t have
any tankers. [Production KC-135 tankers would not be delivered until late
summer of 1957.] The Air Force had kept
the first two tankers, one of them at Wright Field, one at Edwards.
Refueling boom operating limits for KC-135 / RF-101. USAF. |
So,
using the tanker from Edwards, I took the F-101 and stabbed the tanker about a
dozen or so times. The receptacle was
aft of me, over my head. So, on that day
we took off, and my plan was to refuel first over Santa Fe, use the Wright
Field tanker over Wichita then on into St. Louis. But when I took off, the weather was bad over
Santa Fe. Now, normally, you’d drop down
to 15 or 20,000 feet to refuel, you would get a better flow rate down
there. But, the weather was over Santa
Fe. Joe Gandy was flying the tanker, so
I said to him, “Well, let’s try it.” I
got on to the tanker at 39,000 feet (chuckle) and got a load of fuel. Now, in that particular airplane, one of the
first production airplanes, they had an extra 100-gallon tank in it. I got 12,000 pounds of fuel and was using one
burner, just cracking in to stay on there, but I eventually fell off. Well, I had enough fuel to continue.
So the next leg was in burner, going
downhill, where I pulled in on the Wright Field tanker, oh, around Wichita. I had a ready light to get fuel but…I couldn’t
take any fuel, and there was a broken overcast below us. I had now run out of fuel and now I am down
to that 100 gallons on those two big J57 engines, or so I thought, so we turned
back into Wichita. But I switched over
to the 100 gallon to come to find out that in actuality something had happened
up there to siphon it all out. So that’s
what made it so binding to get back into Wichita in through that overcast. I let down through the overcast and on a high
base leg, at Wichita, and shut one engine down as I let down, but I fired up
just as I was rounding out for touchdown and flamed out on the rollout. Come to find out later that when I’d fell off
that tanker, I’d practically ripped the receptacle right out of the
airplane. So, we didn’t go on to St.
Louis.
Detail
of boom refueling receptacle. USAF.
|
I spent
the night there in Wichita and then I was going to go back to talk to Col.
Hanes and bring the airplane back to Edwards. I knew that I had been running in burner quite
a bit, and I needed oil. Well, it was a
new airplane and the only other place that knew how to service the airplane was
another Systems Command base which was down in Albuquerque [Kirtland AFB]. So, the next morning, thinking about those
Schutz valves, before take-off I’d get up on the wing with a chock and beat
along where the valves were (chuckle) under the skin to make sure they were
working. I went down to Albuquerque and
landed there. That’s where I knew I
could get fuel and that they knew how to put oil in the thing there. So, this was Memorial Day, and, of course,
the Indy 500 was going on.
Well, I
got up that morning, there was not a cloud in the sky, got up on the wing and
beat on the Schutz valves, and took off.
Well, right about over where the big crater is in Arizona [Winslow], I
glanced down at my left and saw two great big red lights…a double hydraulic
failure. Well, this is not supposed to
happen! But I remembered that, according
to the McDonnell engineers, they had told me that this couldn’t happen but in
the event it did, that the last 1500 to 1600 pounds of hydraulic pressure that
was trapped in the system could get the gear down. At about the same time I discovered, also,
that my Schutz valves had stopped up and nothing was feeding in to the main
fuel tank. So here I was sucking fuel
out of that No.1 tank, which was only being refueled by gravity feed, just
barely enough to get on and I was really watching that, so I had to have C.G.
on the airplane, I had to contend with that on the letdown, too. Well, I wiggled the stick and got a little
bit of response from it so, I figured, I might as well keep heading west. I was going to go on to home as far as I
could to Edwards and then punch out.
Anyway, I eased that airplane around very
gingerly, and I contacted the tower from somewhere over Barstow, eased around
to up to the north of the base, got it headed south at 20,000 feet, and then I
dropped the gear. Sure enough, that
thing froze up just solid as a rock.
About five…seven seconds, seemed like seven hours….but the gear came
down. Anyway, I got the airplane on the
ground and Iven Kincheloe and Danny [Lt. Col. Boyd L.] Grubaugh met me there at Edwards.
It was
a holiday and I went home, and now lived next door to Kincheloe. Kinch was going to get married pretty soon,
so, I told him about the flight for the two days, and how many times I’d had my
hands on that “Next of Kin” handle and thinking about bailing out. As I got
through, my wife came out and said, “Now let me tell you what happened while
you were gone. One of the kids mashed
his finger in the refrigerator!” But
Kinch thought he was going to get married in the next couple of weeks. Anyway, she went back in the house and
Grubaugh, shaking his head, he said to Kinch, “And you still want to
get married?”
Regrettably, Gus Julian was never to see the final edition of the book, although he did receive a "paste-up" copy that I had prepared in the spring of 2013. He passed away on November 13, 2013. God bless you, sir, and thank you for everything.
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